Ever wondered how those marvelous swirls of marble come to be? Get an inside look at Rule of Three Studio’s hand-marbling fabric process here.

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Transcript

﻿- Marbling is a very old technique. Anything that I've ever kind of held true about color theory is pushed aside in marbling. You can have five colors on the table, think that they look kind of crazy together, but once they're mixed and once they're combined in a pattern, they're stunning. Starting this business has allowed me to explore areas that I wasn't able to do for a bigger brand. So now, we're very involved in every step of the process. The reward is so huge. My name is Paige Cleveland. I have a company named Rule of Three, and we hand marble fabrics in Downtown, Los Angeles. We're working at a very large scale, and still, everything is done by hand here in the studio. Keeping it handmade, we have so much control. So when we're ready to get into production, the first step is to mix all the paints. The paint mixing is the most important part of our process. So getting the temperature right, getting the consistency right, and the tone right is crucial. We'll get the five to seven colors that are in that colorway, mix them up, get them ready, let everything kind of settle, reach room temperature, and then we can begin marbling. We work with a variety of fabrics. We have a silk linen, cotton twill, and a really beautiful leather. We bring down our frames, which we've custom built, and get the fabric as taut around the frame as possible, so that we have a flat surface to marble on. We have a four-foot by 10-foot marbling tank, and it is filled with a thickened water, and that is basically our canvas. The thickness of the tank and the consistency of our paint allows us to float paint on the surface of this water, and then create our pattern on top of that. Then we introduce the raking. So we'll go up and down the tank with one rake horizontally, and then vertically with another rake. We grab the framed silk, hover it over the tank, and slowly, very carefully lay it onto the surface. It's crucial to be very precise. As soon as you seen the pattern kind of saturate the fabric, we lift it off the surface, hang it up, and rinse it off, getting any paint or thickened water that has remained on the fabric. The fabrics are hung to dry, and they will set for a few days to make sure that the color has fully adhered to the fabric. When the fabric is ready, it will either be rolled up and be part of our inventory, or it will go out for an order. And we cut all of our pillows out of that yardage, lamp shades. That's really kind of the last stage of the process. We absolutely want people to be wowed. I think that we want people to see the amount of consideration that we put into this. Not on a precious level, we're not stuffy, but we're committed to making a beautiful product, and we really hope that if you're buying it that you see that. We're doing it for you to respect what you have in your home. I'm very proud that we're producing a product in LA, and I'm very proud that it's a woman-run studio. And it's a small team, but we all are very committed, and I'm very proud of that.

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